Viktor Vohryzek

This is a picture of Viktor Vohryzek, taken in the Atelier Stoklas in Pardubice in the 1910s. Viktor was the brother of my grandmother Filipina Vohryzkova, was active in the Czech-Jewish movement. He was a doctor, writer, founder of a bi-weekly, later weekly magazine, ?Rozvoj? [Development], who progammatically publicized critiques of the older generation. He was the co-founder of the Society of Progressive Czech Jews, which in time became the main organization of the Czech-Jewish movement. Viktor supplied the movement with a new ideological foundation - he and his successors considered assimilation to be first and foremost a religio-ethical matter. They felt Czech nationality to be an unchanging fact, somewhat complicated by Jewish origins. They didn't consider being Czech as a question of language or nationality, but a religio-ethical problem, a matter of spiritual standard and culture. Viktor Vohryzek was greatly respected by everyone in our family, they were influenced by him and tried to live by his legacy.